Imagine the sadness of Keats and Shelley as pot-bellied Victorians
Authors will stoop to any low trick to promote their own wares. So, having written a book about Goethe, who completed his Faust when he was well over 80, I shamelessly used this column to suggest that many of the greatest works of art – Goethe’s Faust, Verdi’s Falstaff, Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas – were composed by ancients. My words were used by a relatively juvenile peer, the historian Andrew Roberts, speaking in the Lords, to justify the continued presence there of the superannuated old bores aged 80 and over. We all know, however, that giants like Goethe and Titian are the exception, and that most of us are past our best by the age of 50. Maurice Bowra’s advice to undergraduates, ‘Don’t waste your time on the old’ – barked out in that pre-1914 tone which itself suggested the gunfire that had mown down many of his contemporaries on...
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